April 27, 2025 • 62 mins
This unique, mostly extemporaneous episode is a deep dive into modern European politics. The current United States government has destabilized the political scene by indicating it will reduce military support for NATO, and by having some of its top officials endorse the controversial far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) Party. We profile all of the main German political parties that were contenders in the February 2025 federal parliamentary elections: the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), the climate-focused Greens, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), the hard-right AfD, the Die Linke (Left) party, and the populist BSW party. We discuss the dissatisfaction with the status quo under Chancellor Olaf Scholz that led to this disruptive election, and analyze the continued influence of anti-migrant sentiment pulling European politics to the right. Finally, we discuss the election's outcomes, including the victory of the CDU that will make Friedrich Merz the next leader of Germany, the continued rise in support for the right-populist AfD in formerly Communist East Germany, and the surprising revival in the fortunes of the left-wing Die Linke party. We conclude by examining how plans to increase German defense spending reflect a diminished partnership between Europe and the USA.
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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
From Boomers to Millennials is a U.S.
history podcast?
This is episode 20B, entitledGerman Elections 2025.
It's a special supplementalepisode.
This is going to be a differentkind of episode than any we've
(00:21):
ever recorded, because I amtrying something different here.
I'm trying to do a non-scriptedepisode, which is very difficult
for me because typically Iprefer to carefully craft
everything I want to say in ascript, and now I feel like I'm
(00:42):
kind of working without a net.
But I do have an outline, ofcourse, to keep this from
getting too chaotic.
But this episode will be moreimprovised than usual.
more in a Dan Carlin style thana Mike Duncan style for all the
history podcast obsessives outthere.
(01:02):
But certainly I'm no Dan Carlin,who's a master of that style.
I've seen him in person talkingoff the cuff, and he's so good
at it.
I have a lot less experiencewith that type of thing.
So this is going to be aninteresting experiment, and it
definitely is going to involve alot more rambling from me.
(01:23):
I'm not going to be quite asfocused and eloquent as I
usually am, but please staytuned because I think this will
be a very interesting episode.
For one thing, it gives me theopportunity to get more content
out there before the end of thismonth.
The only caveat I would give isthat if you have zero interest
(01:45):
in current European geopolitics,This may not be the episode for
you.
And it is getting a bit awayfrom our main focus of US
history and particularly goingback to the 60s.
This is another current eventspodcast like the one we did at
the end of 2024, but itcertainly draws on historical
(02:07):
sources.
The long history between the USand Europe in the post-World War
II era and how that relationshipemerged during the Cold War
After the Cold War and now withthis current new phase where the
relationship between the UnitedStates and Europe seems to be
changing.
So that's part of why thisepisode is interesting.
(02:29):
And I do like to nerd out oninternational politics.
So this is something that I cantalk about extemporaneously
because I did follow the Germanelection pretty closely.
I'm in Europe right now.
I even know someone who voted inthe election, although not in
Germany.
I know a couple German people.
(02:50):
I've been paying more attentionto European media sources like
Deutsche Welle and BBC andthings like that to try to get
up to speed.
So maybe I can translate alittle bit and explain a little
bit to my mostly Americanlisteners how the German system
is different, maybe what we canlearn from it, and how the
(03:13):
recent changes to theirpolitical coalitions may affect
the future of the United Statesand the rest of the world, in
addition to the future ofEurope.
These recent German electionsare particularly significant, I
think, for two main reasons.
One is the global rise of thefar right all across Europe,
(03:34):
largely focused on anti-migrantsentiment.
other things as well, but Ithink the increased number of
people coming from Asia andAfrica into Europe has kind of
disrupted the political statusquo, has created a backlash, and
has allowed some of thesefar-right parties to emerge in
(03:54):
so many places.
You're looking at NationalRally, I think she's calling it
now, with Marine Le Pen inFrance.
You have Nigel Farage's movementin the UK.
You have Georgia Maloneyactually in power, albeit as
part of a coalition with ananti-migrant right-wing party in
Italy.
The most extreme example outsideof Russia is Viktor Orban in
(04:19):
Hungary, who has taken a verydifferent tack on many cultural
issues and foreign policy issuesthat are outside the mainstream
of the European Union.
and has aligned himself moreclosely with the far-right in
America, including Donald Trump,who gave a shout-out to Orban in
(04:41):
his debate with Kamala Harris.
I'm not sure a lot of Americansrecognize the reference to Orban
or knew who he is, but Trumpbragged about how much Viktor
Orban loves me.
So all this is to foregroundthat there's even a far-right
party in Germany which, forhistorical reasons...
(05:01):
People are extra nervous aboutthe extreme right in Germany.
That party is the alternativefor Deutschland party.
One of the big questions infront of these elections was,
there seemed to be this surge ofsupport for the AFD.
How big would it be?
How powerful would they get?
(05:21):
Would they actually have achance to get into government?
And what would that mean for theEU?
So that was one thing.
The second element was, thathung over everyone's head
awaiting this election inGermany is how the changing
relationship between the USA andthe EU would affect the outcome
(05:43):
because all of a sudden you'rehaving an administration in the
USA with the Trump-Vanceadministration that is more
hostile or at least skeptical tothe European Union and to NATO
saying Europe needs to carry itIt's weight.
They need to pay more for theirown defense.
(06:05):
J.D.
Vance really shocked some peoplewhen he made his first, I think
it was his first trip to Europe,and he went over there and
basically said Europeans don'tvalue free speech.
They're doing too muchcensorship of the far right.
He even said that the biggestthreat to Europe and its values
were from within, from like...
(06:27):
government censorship andintolerance of certain views
outside the mainstream.
And this is at a time whenpeople in some parts of Europe
feel potentially threatened byRussia.
You recently had Sweden andFinland, who had been neutral
for so long, finally joined NATObecause they were so freaked out
(06:49):
by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
And there are concerns aboutChina and other powers around
the world.
So it really shocked a lot ofpeople in Europe to have Vance
basically say, I have a lot ofproblems with with you people.
And I think, you know, you'redoing a lot of things wrong.
It was, you know, and you canhave a debate over what is free
(07:10):
speech and what is hate speechand what shouldn't shouldn't be
allowed.
Should you be able to post Nazistuff on public forums?
Well, in the USA, that's Totallylegal in Germany, not so much.
And we can have a debate aboutthat.
But it just seemed like a weirdthing to do for countries that
have been longtime U.S.
(07:31):
partners and allies to go overthere and be so critical of them
and their political systems.
So the rhetoric coming from thisnew administration, you know,
some of the speeches by Trumpand Vance about not liking what
the EU is doing and not beingsure about continuing on with
NATO and needing Europe to paymore and to take care of itself.
(07:54):
You have all that creatingdiplomatic uncertainty.
And then you have the tariffsissue creating economic
uncertainty in Europe.
The administration has been Ididn't expect a big...
(08:26):
international conflict withCanada.
There were a lot of things I sawpotentially on the horizon when
Trump won the election inNovember.
That came kind of out of theblue to me.
But today we're focusing onEurope.
So I'll stop rambling about thebackground to the election and
talk about the status quo inGermany before the election
(08:48):
started.
Because Thank you.
(09:14):
But many European countries havea very different political
structure to their system, whichmakes it far more conducive to
having a multi-party system.
And that's certainly the case inGermany.
Going into the recent election,Germany was governed by a
coalition of three parties.
The SPD, the Green Party, andthe FPD.
(09:37):
So first I'd like to tell you alittle bit about those parties.
The first one...
I want to get into is the SDP,which translates, or sorry, the
SPD.
It's very easy to get that mixedup because it translates to
Social Democratic Party.
But the actual full name, andI've never formally studied
(09:59):
German, so you really have tobear with me on these.
Its full name isSozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands.
So to understand the origins ofthe SPD, you need to go back to
19th century Germany.
And we won't do this much of adeep dive into every single
political party or we'll be hereall day.
(10:21):
But SPD emerged out of theworking class in Germany.
Like the United States, theGerman Empire industrialized
later than, for instance,Britain, which was where the
Industrial Revolution started.
So in the late 19th century, youhave this huge shift where all
(10:43):
these factories are opening upin Germany.
Many people are moving from thecountryside into the factories.
There's opportunities foradvancement, but also life is
very hard in the factories.
Many workers are dissatisfiedwith the dangerous conditions
and low pay.
So you start developing theseworking class movements.
(11:04):
And the SPD came out of thattime period.
And it contained some prettyradical elements, including
people who were influenced bythe ideas of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels about having aneventual socialist revolution.
And for that reason...
Under the Second Reich, whichwas the government of the German
(11:26):
Empire from the new unifiedGerman state that emerged in
1870 under the leadership ofChancellor Otto von Bismarck,
formerly ruled by Kaisers ormonarchs, basically, they
weren't really a democracy.
They did have a parliamentarybody that had a role, but there
was some limitations on thepower of the Social Democrats,
(11:48):
particularly because they wereconsidered to be a potentially
subversive force to the empire.
The rubber really hits the roadas to what kind of role the SPD
will play when you get to theoutbreak of World War I.
The question is, will thesocialists, and they were
considered not just socialdemocrats but outright
(12:10):
socialists at the time, will thesocialists support the war
effort for Germany?
And it was a big dilemma for theleaders because there was this
idea out there that workers inFrance, Germany, Britain,
wherever, have no reason to hateeach other for these petty
nationalistic differences.
And really, they should uniteagainst the upper classes rather
(12:34):
than fighting their brothers whohappen to be across a border.
Now, if you're a strongnationalist, that kind of
universalist rhetoric is goingto seem ridiculous to you.
But, you know, a lot ofsocialists believe that.
They believed in unity of theinternational working class.
But at the end of the day, whatends up happening in Germany and
in most other European countriesinvolved in the war is the
(12:57):
socialists largely go along withthe government and support the
war effort.
One major exception to that isin Russia, where unexpectedly
during World War I you have thefamous Russian Revolution in
1917.
And this becomes a majorflashpoint that really splits
the left throughout Europe.
(13:18):
Coming out of the RussianRevolution, the SPD splits into
different factions.
The more radical faction leavesand becomes the communists, and
the more moderate...
center-left faction remains inthe SPD.
And there was all kinds of dramabetween the Communists and the
Social Democrats in theaftermath of World War I right
(13:41):
up to into the 1930s.
I don't have time to get intoall that.
But the most important thing toknow is ever since then, the SPD
has been a party that appealedpredominantly to the urban
working class, but was morecenter-left, not a radical
party.
Now today, the SPD's support isstrongest in cities within what
(14:04):
was formerly the nation of WestGermany.
There's a big divide within thevarious parties over whether
they're more popular in the Westor in the East, which we'll get
into more as we discuss some ofthe other parties.
But the SPD's particularlypopular in areas of northwestern
Germany, like up near Hamburg,closer to Scandinavia, some of
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the traditionally Protestantareas.
but also in areas far to thewest near the border of France.
These are more traditionallyCatholic areas, areas with the
industrialized Rhineland, areaslike Saarland, which was a
traditional kind of workingclass mining area, Cologne or
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Cologne, cities like that.
They remain strong in thoseareas, but their base is aging.
Some of the younger people whoare more progressive and may
have traditionally voted withthe SPD have been attracted to
the Green Party and otherparties.
SPD nevertheless won the 2021German federal election with the
(15:07):
largest plurality vote of anyparty, defeating the CDU after
the departure of its longtimeleader, Angela Merkel.
Merkel's potential successorlost the election to Olaf
Scholz, the current chancellorof Germany, very soon to lose
that role, as we'll explain, dueto the results of the election.
But Olaf Scholz has been thechancellor.
(15:28):
He's considered moderate,pragmatic, a bit boring, even by
German standards.
And his party would benegatively affected by
dissatisfaction with the statusquo in the recent elections.
Now then we get to the nextparty, the Green Party.
The Social Democrats, theGreens, and the Free Democrats
(15:50):
were together in what was calledthe Traffic Light Coalition.
This refers to the colors of therespective parties.
The Social Democrats' officialcolor is red.
The Green Party is, shocker, asgreen as its official color.
And the Free Democrats haveyellow as their official color.
So in this very cutesydesignation, they call this the
(16:12):
Traffic Light Coalition becauseit's like the colors on a
traffic light.
The Green Party emerged in WestGermany out of the activism
related to environmental issuesthat came out of the 1960s and
1970s.
They were founded in 1980.
Now at the time, there was a bigconcern not only about
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pollution, Germany was a veryindustrialized country where
that was a major issue, but alsowith other environmental threats
such as nuclear waste and ageneral fear also of nuclear
weapons.
In the early 80s, there was thishuge no-nukes movement in
Europe.
This was against a backdropwhere you have...
(16:55):
The Cold War getting very scaryfor the final time, really, in
the early 1980s.
You have Reagan coming to powerin the USA.
You have Margaret Thatchercoming to power in the UK.
These leaders take a moreaggressive tone.
They invest in a lot of weaponssystems, including more nuclear
weapons.
And the Soviets respond in kind.
(17:18):
Actually, the Soviets during the1980s created a really scary
biological weapons program.
If you want to learn more aboutthat, you can read David
Hoffman's book, The Dead Hand.
I will include on our Patreonsite a list of recommended
reading related to this episode.
(17:40):
Anyway, the Greens become aninfluential party based on
environmental concerns andopposition to...
nuclear waste, nuclear power,and the proliferation of nuclear
weapons.
Unsurprisingly, currently theirmain focus is climate change.
They're generally considered, orcenter-left, so how are they
different from the center-leftSPD?
(18:02):
Well, a lot of it has to do withtheir base.
Their base tends to be a bityounger than the SPD and a bit
more upwardly mobile, I wouldsay.
They're very big in collegetowns in the western part of
Germany.
A lot of young professionals areattracted to them.
Their views are what we in theUnited States would call
socially liberal in terms ofattitudes toward immigration,
(18:26):
LGBT issues, things like that.
An example of a situation wherethe Greens and the Social
Democrats might come intoconflict is, for instance,
maintaining jobs in a factorythat is polluting the
atmosphere.
The Social Democrats, who havethe support of the unionized
laborers who work at thatfactory, might say, hey, we need
(18:47):
to keep that factory open,whereas the Greens might say,
no, it isn't worth the damageit's doing to the environment
that factory needs to close.
So those are some of thetensions that could come up.
But generally, both of theseparties are left-leaning, so it
kind of makes sense for them togo into coalition together.
That brings us to the thirdmember of the Traffic Light
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Coalition, kind of the oddball,which is the Free Democrats.
FPD officially stands for FreieDemokratische Partei.
Again, pardon my terribleGerman.
This is basically a classicallyliberal party, liberal in the
sense of favoring free marketsand free trade.
(19:29):
If you go back to episode 13a ofour podcast entitled Defining
Liberalism, We did a deep diveinto the meaning of the term
liberalism and how it emerged asmeaning something different in
Europe versus in the UnitedStates.
So this is more the Europeandefinition of liberal, which is
(19:50):
to the right of what isconsidered liberal in North
America.
Generally, the supporters of theFPD are socially or culturally
more liberal, but in terms ofeconomics, they're more
pro-business.
I think they're supported by alot of entrepreneurial people,
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people who own small businesses,people who are trying to work
their way up the corporateladder and are frustrated by
government red tape.
I wouldn't necessarily call themlibertarian because there's
almost no one in Europe that isso viscerally anti-government as
American libertarians are.
But they're kind of leaning in aslightly libertarian direction.
(20:34):
While the Free Democrats may seeeye to eye with their coalition
partners and the SocialDemocrats and the Green Party on
some issues regarding maybeimmigration policy or other
cultural issues, clearly thisgroup has the biggest cause to
come into conflict with theother parties on economic
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issues.
because the other parties in thetraffic-like coalition usually
want more regulation across theboard, whereas the Free
Democrats tend to want less.
Unsurprisingly, it was the FPDthat finally blew up the
coalition because they did notfind the budget that the other
two parties were pushing for tobe acceptable.
(21:19):
The leader of the FreeDemocrats, a guy named Christian
Linder, basically led the effortto pull out of the coalition,
and that is what triggered theneed to have the recent
election.
The largest opposition partyoutside of the main governing
coalition is the CDU, theChristian Democratic Union.
This is a center-right party,and it has dominated German
(21:43):
politics for most of the 21stcentury.
Christian Democratic partiesemerged in the aftermath of
World War II The far right,particularly the fascistic
movements, obviously had beendiscredited.
Christian democratic partiesfilled the vacuum of being
conservative parties that wantedto protect traditional ways of
(22:06):
life, the traditional role ofChristianity in Europe, but
which also wanted to supportdemocracy.
Christian democratic partiestended to support the creation
of welfare states in post-warEurope, but favored a more
limited version than thatproposed by the Social
Democrats.
They were supported bytraditionally religious people
(22:29):
in small towns and rural areas,and they were especially strong
in Catholic areas.
But despite having the wordChristian in its name, the
modern CDU is definitely not atheocratic party in an
increasingly secular Germany.
It isn't trying to ban abortionor follow other parts of the
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agenda of the USA's so-calledChristian right.
In the 21st century, the GermanCDU has stood for fiscal
discipline, free trade, andclose ties with the EU and NATO.
It is basically a pragmaticcentrist party that tweaks the
status quo just enough tomaintain the trust of its aging
(23:12):
supporters.
In fact, their most successfulpolitician, Angela Merkel...
due to her stance on migrationand the fact that she didn't get
along so well with George W.
Bush and Donald Trump.
Many Americans probably wouldhave assumed she was more on the
left side of the politicalspectrum, but that's not the
(23:32):
case.
The Christian Democrats are morefiscally conservative.
They want a balanced budget.
In Germany, they pushedausterity policies for both
their own country and across theEU.
In terms of foreign policy, theyhave a strong tradition of being
militantly anti-communist.
(23:54):
In many countries, they wereassociated with the Catholic
Church's strong stance againstcommunism during the Cold War.
There is this strange elementalso where the Christian
Democrats...
governed in partnership withsort of a subsidiary called the
Christian Social Union, which isthe party that dominates in the
(24:14):
very Catholic region of Bavariain the southwest of Germany.
That's where Munich is.
It's where BMW comes from,obviously.
And it's kind of a one-partyregion, obviously.
And usually when one partydominates, you think there's
something shady going on andthings aren't really democratic.
But democracy in Germany,including in Bavaria, seems
(24:36):
quite robust.
It just seems that the CSU issuper popular there.
That's a very prosperous regionin Germany.
So things are going well.
The population figures, if it'snot broke, don't fix it.
I should point out the ChristianDemocrats are not only popular
in Catholic areas, and they'renot as explicitly affiliated
(24:59):
with the Catholic side ofChristianity as, say, their
equivalents in countries likeItaly would tend to be.
So they don't have a sectarianaffiliation, and they have many
Protestant supporters intraditionally Protestant parts
of Germany.
Europe is generally a lot lessreligious than it used to be.
(25:20):
The percentage of people whoattend church has been declining
for decades.
So I'm fairly certain you don'tneed to explicitly be Christian
or self-identify as Christian tobe in the CDU.
So this is a party that secularpeople very much participate in
and can feel comfortable in,despite its Christian roots and
ideological origins.
(25:41):
Angela Merkel was reallyarguably the great centrist
politician of the 21st centuryin Europe.
Although she wasn'ttraditionally charismatic, for a
time she was wildly popular andwidely trusted by the German
public.
Even those critical of herpolicies can acknowledge her
incredible political talents,but probably the most
(26:02):
controversial thing she ever didregarded the migrant crisis.
In the aftermath of the USA's2003 decision to invade Iraq,
the country devolved into chaosand insurrection.
and US troops were stuckfighting there for years.
When Barack Obama came in in2009, he fulfilled his campaign
(26:24):
promise of largely pulling UStroops out of Iraq.
Unfortunately, the aftermath ofthe chaos caused by the US
toppling of the Iraqi regime I'mnot here to defend Saddam
Hussein or anything, buttoppling that regime did create
a power vacuum and cascadingchaos across the region.
And that's what you see happen.
(26:46):
You see things destabilizepolitically in Iraq and Syria,
which led to the rise of scarygroups like ISIS and a lot of
internal fighting and civil war.
And that creates a lot ofsuffering, misery, and people
fleeing up through Turkey intothe EU.
At the height of the migrantcrisis in 2015, Merkel agreed to
(27:09):
accept over half a millionasylum seekers, most of them
from the Middle East, forhumanitarian reasons.
Political backlash over thisdecision became strong by early
2016, following reports thatlarge groups of migrant men had
attacked women on New Year's Eve2015 in Cologne, Germany.
(27:33):
While most immigrants werelaw-abiding, the small portion
of them involved in crime orterrorist incidents became a
major talking point for agrowing far-right movement.
And that leads us to the secondbiggest opposition party, the
AFD, which emerged in theaftermath of the migrant crisis.
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The AFD is the Alternative forDeutschland party.
It was founded in 2013.
They differ with thecenter-right CDU in a couple of
areas.
For one thing, they're more of aEuroskeptic party, which means
they're skeptical of allianceslike the EU and NATO.
Traditionally, the center-rightCDU was very strongly supportive
(28:17):
of those alliances, verystrongly supportive of a
partnership with the U.S.
and the reliance on the U.S.
for military protection, as theU.S.
has several military bases inGermany, and this has allowed
Germany to avoid spending a tonof money on defense.
There's a lot of unease, bothinside of Germany and throughout
(28:38):
Europe, about the Germany beingheavily militarized because a
large percentage of thecountries in Europe were at one
point or another invaded oroccupied by Germans during the
20th century.
So letting the USA carry thatburden was a compromise that
seemed to work out well foreverybody.
Although it's increasingly onethe Americans in the aftermath
(29:00):
of the Cold War are questioning.
But for the AFD, they wantsomething different.
They want Germany to more go italone, Germany for the Germans,
because they are highlynationalistic as a far-right
party.
They were founded in oppositionto migration, so they're very
anti-immigrant.
They want Germans to be able tofeel more proud of being German.
(29:23):
This includes less guilt overGermany's history, including the
Second World War, the Holocaust,things like that.
So it probably won't shock youto hear that some of the more
extreme neo-fascist or neo-Nazielements in Germany have been
attracted to this party and havehad affiliations with this
(29:46):
party.
The really interesting and kindof puzzling thing about the AfD
is their role as a regionalparty, because they are far more
popular in the formerlycommunist eastern part of
Germany than they are in thewest.
Now let's flashback for a minuteto 1989.
The Berlin Wall comes down.
(30:08):
East Germany and West Germanyhad been apart for over 40
years.
The East Germans lived under acommunist dictatorship.
They dealt with a heavy-handedsecret police known as the
Stasi.
By the time of Germanreunification in 1990, it seemed
most people in East Germany didwant to move away from communism
(30:30):
and reunite with the West.
There was a merger of East andWest, but generally it was the
East being folded into the WestGerman capitalistic democratic
system.
Communist East Germany laggedbehind prosperous capitalist
West Germany economically.
West Germany had all thesesuccessful companies and was one
(30:53):
of the most prosperous countriesin Europe.
My understanding is that theGerman government Once Germany
reunited into one country, theytried to make a lot of efforts
to invest in formerly communistEast Germany and bring them up
to speed and a greater degree ofparity with the West.
But despite all these efforts,ultimately over 40 years of
(31:16):
being under totally differentsystems has just proven really
difficult to completely undo.
So to this day, on a whole listof economic factors,
unemployment rate, per capitaincome, number of cars per
household, a significant gapbetween East and West Germany
remains in place.
(31:37):
The continued economic problemsin the East have led its
population to have a lot ofpolitical frustration.
And in recent years, some haveturned to the far-right AFD
party to express this.
Obviously, the far right hasappealed to a lot of downwardly
mobile, economicallymarginalized people in other
places, including in the UnitedStates.
(31:59):
It gives those people somethingto be proud of, their national
identity.
It gives them people to blamefor their problems, which is
often elites and foreigners.
The most confusing thing aboutwhy the AfD has been so popular
in the East, however, is thereare way more immigrants and
migrants in the West than thereare in the East.
(32:20):
So it's a bit of a puzzle.
But for whatever the reason, theAfD has become more and more
popular in the former EastGermany.
Now, if you're going to try tobe successful as a far-right
nationalist party in 21stcentury Germany, one huge
obstacle you're going to face isthat, due to the history of the
Third Reich...
which ultimately ended indisaster for Germany and led the
(32:43):
Germans to be perceived.
Most of us would agree that atleast under the Nazis, the
Germans were among the mainvillains of the 20th century.
In the aftermath of World WarII, the Germans wanted to move
away from all that.
They wanted to become apeaceful, prosperous, democratic
country.
They wanted to move away frommilitarism and
hyper-nationalism.
(33:04):
As a result...
People are taught in schoolsacross Germany of the dangers
and the risks of extremenationalism.
So if you're a party like theAfD, how do you avoid the label
of being the breeding grounds ofa new Hitler?
Well, one way is you can pick aleader who no one would confuse
with Hitler if she were walkingdown the Strasse.
(33:26):
The AFD's current leader, AliceWeidel, is openly lesbian, and
her domestic partner is anon-white woman originally from
Sri Lanka.
So clearly someone like that isnot easy to label as a Nazi with
the associations we have withNazis being racist, homophobic,
etc.
(33:47):
Weidel is not representative ofher party's predominantly
struggling male East German basein other ways, too.
She is a financially successfulwoman, a former banker from West
Germany.
She has portrayed Muslimimmigrants as a threat to
women's rights and LGBT rights.
(34:09):
Now, Islamist terrorism hasbecome a salient issue in Europe
ever since 9-11 and the start ofthe U.S.-led War on Terror.
In 2004 and 2005, bombingsoccurred in Spain and in the UK
that killed a total of 249people.
(34:29):
They seem to have been partiallymotivated by those governments'
support of the American invasionof Iraq.
Then, between January 2015 andAugust 2017, There was another
shocking wave of attacks, mostof which were committed by
members and supporters of ISIS.
(34:52):
These attacks occurred in Paris,Brussels, Nice, Berlin,
Manchester, and Barcelona.
Over 330 civilians were killedin this surge of Islamist
terrorism.
And it is understandable thatthese events, coinciding with
more refugees coming into Europeduring the migrant crisis, was
(35:13):
something that createdwidespread public concern.
However, it is worth rememberingthat most of the migrants were
themselves fleeing the violenceof groups like ISIS.
Also, it should be noted thatthere have been no more attacks
that killed over 10 people since2017, although there have been
some smaller attacks.
(35:34):
This decrease in terrorismoccurred despite the continued
presence of Middle Easternimmigrants and refugees in
Europe.
But parties like the AFD stillsee them as a threat, if not to
Europeans' immediate physicalsecurity, then a threat to their
culture, economic well-being,and way of life.
(35:55):
It's important to point out nowthat I've mentioned that there
have actually been incidents ofviolence by extreme Islamist
groups in Europe since the startof the 21st century, that
Muslims are not a politicalmonolith.
Just because someone is a devoutMuslim doesn't necessarily mean
they're trying to oppose theirviews on non-Muslims or trying
(36:17):
to promote a theocratic agendaany more than all Christians are
trying to promote a theocraticagenda.
Moreover, the Arab and Muslimpopulations that have come to
Europe in recent decades havedifferent degrees of
religiosity, various types ofpolitical and cultural views.
This idea that Muslims are goingto take over and force Western
(36:40):
women to cover their heads, I'mnot aware of a single example of
that ever happening anywhere inEurope.
At least it hasn't happenedunless you go back to the
invasions of the Ottoman Empireor something.
But nevertheless, the bogeymanof an Islamic takeover of Europe
is something that fuelsfar-right sentiment.
(37:02):
So let's get back to the AFD.
The AFD in previous nationalelections have captured 12-15%
of the overall vote, But thething that many people found
alarming across Europe was thatin the most recent polls, the
AFD was looking like they weregoing to get over 20% of the
(37:22):
vote.
And the big question was, couldthey actually be brought into
the government?
In many European countries,there's this whole idea of a
firewall or a cordon sanitaire,as the French would say, to keep
potential neo-fascist elementsout of government.
And in many countries...
The center-left, the moderates,and the center-right all agreed
(37:43):
we should not work withextreme-right parties.
But the more successful thefar-right parties become, the
more tempting it's going to be,particularly for center-right
parties, to go into coalitionwith them.
because that can be thedifference between the
center-right party being shutout of government power to being
part of the governing coalition.
(38:04):
For instance, in Sweden, thefirewall has broken down.
The current governing coalitionin Sweden is center-right, but
in order to beat the SocialDemocrats who have traditionally
dominated the political scene inpost-World War II Sweden, the
center and center-right partiesmade a deal with the far-right
anti-migrant Sweden Democrats.
(38:25):
Technically, the SwedenDemocrats are not part of the
governing coalition, but theyare defined as like partners who
voted for the center-rightcoalition and allowed it to
become a governing majority.
So you're seeing these thingsbreak down across Europe.
Concerns about a weakeningfirewall in Germany grew during
2023.
(38:46):
when it was revealed that AFDofficials had secretly met with
far-right leaders and discusseda plan to deport not only
resident aliens, but also Germancitizens with an immigrant
background.
Before the 2025 federalelections, AFD nevertheless
seemed to be growing morepopular than ever, according to
(39:07):
the opinion polls.
Okay, so that's more than enoughinformation about the far-right
and the AFD.
So let's move to the other mainopposition parties, which are
more on the left extreme ofGerman politics.
In the post-reunification era,Die Linke has traditionally been
(39:28):
considered the most left-wingparty.
They currently identify as ademocratic socialist party.
The most controversial thingabout Die Linke is their origins
in East Germany.
They emerged out of the remnantsof the Communist Party of East
Germany.
There were even some communistEast German politicians who then
(39:50):
became successful politiciansunder democracy, affiliating
with Die Linke.
Die Linke literally means theleft in German, if I'm not
mistaken.
Like the AFD, Die Linke has beendisproportionately popular in
Eastern Germany.
Now didn't the population offormerly communist East Germany
(40:12):
openly rebel against thecommunist regime at the end of
the Cold War?
Didn't they want to become partof the West and be incorporated
into West Germany's capitalistdemocratic system?
Well, for the most part, theanswer is yes, but these things
are complicated.
Many older people lost theirjobs and their social status
(40:32):
during the transition tocapitalism.
and a significant number of EastGermans developed a nostalgia
for the old system.
There is a good German film madeback in 2003 called Goodbye
Lenin that deals with thisnostalgia issue.
There genuinely was a populationwithin the former East that
thought at least some thingswere better under the old
(40:54):
system.
Usually they didn't necessarilywant the Stasi back or to
rebuild the wall or anythinglike that.
But they did advocate for someof these farther left policies,
which led to the popularity ofDie Linke in some of these
places.
Meanwhile, Die Linke's roots inEast German communism made even
left-leaning people in the partof Germany that was under the
(41:17):
capitalistic democraticgovernment of West Germany very
nervous about voting for DieLinke.
Their strong association withEast Germany, the fact that they
incorporated politicians fromits authoritarian communist
system made them absolutelypolitically toxic to a lot of
people in West Germany, evenvery left-leaning people.
(41:39):
So a lot of left-leaning peoplewould support the leftmost wing
of the Social Democrats, theSPD, or would support the Green
Party or some other party.
Now, both of the major partiesin post-World War II Germany,
which is the Social Democratsand the Christian Democrats,
have traditionally been verysupportive of NATO and also the
(42:00):
EU.
They were very supportive ofGermany's alliance with the USA,
although under SPD leadership,Germany did decline to
participate in the coalitionthat invaded Iraq in 2003.
Otherwise, the main two partieshave been big supporters of
international cooperation andaffiliation with the other
(42:21):
countries of the WesternDemocratic Bloc.
This is another area whereD-Link has been different.
They've been more Euro-skeptic,which means more skeptical of
the EU, and they have been hometo some explicitly pro-Russian
elements, people who side morewith Vladimir Putin's Russia
than with, for instance, theUnited States.
(42:43):
in recent geopoliticalconflicts.
So this is another thing thatmakes people in West Germany
traditionally be pretty queasyabout Die Linke and not being
open to supporting them.
After all, East Germany was kindof a puppet state of Russia when
it was the Soviet Union, and nowwe see this party with partially
(43:04):
communist origins still havingthese pro-Russian leanings.
However, in recent years, DieLinke faced another big problem.
With the rise of the AfD in theEast, they were increasingly
losing market share.
They were losing part of theirsupport base from the far-left
party to the far-right party.
As strange as that may be, theredefinitely were voters who made
(43:28):
that journey in the former EastGermany.
Internal tensions finally led afaction within Die Linke to
split off and form their ownparty.
This faction was led by a formerdelinquent politician by the
name of Sarah Wagenknecht.
She created a new party,modestly named after herself,
(43:49):
called the Bundes-SarahWagenknecht, or BSW, which
apparently translates intoEnglish as the Sarah Wagenknecht
Alliance.
Now, it seems to me that a bigpart of the motivation behind
the BSW is was to kind of try torecapture some of those voters
(44:11):
who had gone over to the AFD.
So the BSW favors left-wingeconomic policies, more generous
benefits for citizens from thegovernment, but the BSW also
took more conservative views oncultural issues, especially
migration.
The BSW position is that Germanyshould be taking far fewer
(44:34):
migrants in.
They've also staked out moreconservative positions on issues
like LGBT rights.
I believe the BSW isparticularly skeptical of trans
rights.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, giventhese cultural views, the BSW
also has absorbed those formermembers of Dylanka who are most
(44:56):
skeptical of NATO, mostsympathetic to Putin's Russia.
So the BSW has emerged as thisparty that seems to be
tailor-made toward a lot ofpeople in the former East
Germany who are more culturallyconservative but need more
economic help from thegovernment.
The polls heading into the 2025election showed that the BSW is
(45:18):
getting more than 5% of thenational vote, which would give
them a position within theBundestag, within the
legislature of Germany.
These polls also showed BSWexceeding the percentage being
earned by the remaining portionof Die Linke.
So for a time prior to theelection, it looked like Die
(45:38):
Linke may basically be a spentforce politically and would be
replaced by this weird kind ofleft conservative hybrid party,
the BSW.
So now let's discuss theconditions immediately before
the election.
Olaf Scholz and the GoverningCoalition...
had become very unpopular.
(45:58):
A big part of this was some ofthe same economic turmoil that
provoked a lot of backlashagainst the Biden administration
and the USA.
Complaints about risinginflation, the cost of living,
the increasing cost of housing.
As the global economy hasundergone these aftershocks of
(46:21):
the COVID-19 pandemic andeverything it did to the supply
chain, We've been going throughthese waves of inflation.
All around the world, we've seenso much anti-status quo
political sentiment and all thispopulist anti-establishment
energy.
And Germany is certainly noexception to that.
Part of that populist energyincludes skepticism about
(46:44):
letting in more migrants.
While there are some people whoadvocate for an extreme
position...
such as having a totally openborder on the one hand or
closing off national borderscompletely to all immigrants on
the other, mainstream Europeanpolitical parties generally
accept the premise that theywill have to screen potential
(47:06):
newcomers, letting in somemigrants and deporting others.
Among both center-right andcenter-left parties, The general
trend in recent years has beentoward adopting stricter
criteria and thus admittingfewer immigrants.
This policy shift has takenplace in part out of a reaction
(47:26):
to the rise of hardline,far-right anti-migrant parties
all across Europe.
While many agree it is necessaryto adopt these tougher policies
to limit the appeal ofextreme-right parties with
authoritarian tendencies...
Some, mostly on the left,express concern that this will
cause mainstream partiesthemselves to become more
(47:49):
extreme and intolerant.
So this is pretty complicated.
With growing anti-migrantsentiment in European countries
including Germany, the CDU, thecenter-right party we discussed
before, which was leading in thepolls, but was facing the AFD in
their rearview mirror, with theAFD in second place.
(48:12):
So it's understandable that theCDU was tempted to pivot to the
right on immigration, and that'sexactly what they did.
The CDU, under the leadership oftheir candidate, Friedrich Merz,
came out in favor of tougherlaws against illegal immigration
and more restrictions onmigration.
And in January of this year,they pushed a bill in the
(48:33):
Bundestag that would implementthose policies.
Now, there was a convention thatmainstream parties, due to the
firewall, should never openlywelcome or seek out the support
of the extreme far-right party,the AFD.
But in the case of this bill,that's exactly what the CDU did.
They welcomed the support of theAFD in passing this bill.
(48:56):
This is where DeLinka comes backinto our picture.
Even after some members haddeparted to form the BSW, Die
Linke still had a small numberof representatives in the
Bundestag in January of 2025.
One of their leaders was a36-year-old woman named Heidi
Reichenick.
She gave a fiery speech thatcondemned the CDU's
(49:19):
collaboration with the AFD onthe anti-immigrant bill, and she
warned that fascists were nowbeing allowed to participate in
German governance for the firsttime since World War II.
Heidi Reichenach did not looklike a stereotypical German
politician.
Her short sleeves showed hertattoos.
including a tattoo of RosaLuxemburg, a German communist
(49:43):
who was murdered by a right-wingmilitia during a revolutionary
uprising in Berlin during thechaotic aftermath of World War
I.
The speech by the charismatic,red-haired Heidi Reichenach went
viral in Germany.
This attention failed to dampenthe support for the CDU and the
support for the AFD in theupcoming election.
(50:06):
But what it did do was turnaround the political fortunes of
the seemingly doomed Die LinkeParty.
The German election was held onFebruary 23rd, 2025.
They have a very interestingsystem.
They have something called theWahlenmacht, which is developed
by German political scientists,I believe with government
(50:27):
support, where citizens can goin, answer a bunch of questions,
and it matches them up with thepolitical party that most
matches their beliefs.
The Volomat is available on awebsite and as a mobile phone
app.
Another key difference withGermany being a multi-party
parliamentary system usingproportional representation is
(50:49):
that voters vote not onlybetween the specific candidates
in their district, they alsocast a general vote for one of
the major political parties inGermany.
After all of the actual regionalrepresentatives are elected, the
German system uses the overallresults in these votes for the
(51:11):
parties to bring in additionalmembers off something called the
party list in order to make surethat the Bundestag more
accurately represents the viewsof the German general public.
Let me try to explain this alittle more clearly.
Let's say that in the next U.S.
congressional election, assumingthat takes place, Let's say that
(51:33):
the public gets fed up with themain two parties, the
Republicans and the Democrats.
And in every singlecongressional district across
the nation, 10% of the voterssupport the Libertarian Party
and 10% support the Green Party.
That would result in exactlyzero representatives in Congress
(51:54):
from either of those parties.
Because if you don't have thebiggest plurality in any
individual district, you don'tget represented.
It's a first-past-the-post,winner-take-all system.
So unless the Greens or theLibertarians can actually come
in first place in one of thesedistricts, they aren't going to
get any congressionalrepresentatives.
(52:15):
However, under the Germanproportional representation
system, if 10% of Americans casttheir congressional vote for the
Libertarian Party, then 10% ofthe members of Congress are
going to be from the LibertarianParty.
Now, you can probably see theappeal of this as a system that
maybe more accurately reflectsthe political views of the
(52:36):
public, but that's not thesystem the USA has.
So after all this buildup, let'stalk about what actually
happened in the 2025 Germanelections.
As expected, the CDU was theparty that got the biggest chunk
of the vote.
They only got 29%, but that's abig chunk in a system with so
many parties.
(52:57):
Friedrich Merz...
will be the next chancellor ofGermany.
Actually, he may be already.
I'm not sure where they are inthe coalition talks.
There was a big concern I heardamong some pundits that the AFD
might do even better thanexpected in the polls.
We've seen some of theseright-wing populist movements
(53:17):
and politicians be undercountedin polling, theoretically
because some people don't wantto admit that they're going to
vote for the right-wingpopulist.
We saw polling underestimatesupport for Brexit in the United
Kingdom.
We saw polling underestimatesupport for Donald Trump in U.S.
presidential elections.
It's happened all three timeshe's run.
(53:38):
He's outperformed the polling.
But the AFD in this case did notoutperform their polling, at
least not by much.
They were estimated to get about20%.
They got 21%.
Probably not enough that wouldin any way tempt the CDU to
actually coalition with them.
In third place, you have theformerly leading party, the SPD,
(54:02):
getting only a little over 16%of the vote, one of their worst
performances in history.
I mentioned that Olaf Scholz,the incumbent SPD chancellor,
was quite unpopular.
You also saw the Green Partyfinish fourth, and the Greens
saw a decline in their voteshare.
(54:22):
They only got 12%.
They may not make it into thenext coalition.
In fourth place, with 9% of thevote, you have Die Linke, co-led
by Jan van Aken and HeidiReikeneck, who I mentioned
before.
In the back of the pack, we haveSarah Wagenknecht's BSW party
(54:43):
and Christian Lindner's FDP.
Both of these parties got above4% of the vote, but below 5%.
And that is a hugely significantnumber.
Let me explain why.
You have to get a minimum of 5%of the national vote to get
seats within the Bundestag.
(55:04):
So both the BSW and the FPD areout of the German parliament for
this next cycle.
In polls during 2024, it lookedlike the new left conservative
hybrid BSW party wouldessentially take away part of
the former DeLinca support,getting over the 5% threshold,
(55:24):
while DeLinca was polling below5%.
But instead of BSW shuttingDeLinca out of the government,
it looks like the oppositehappened.
Allow me to explain why thatmight be.
My big theory here, and I thinkit's backed up by the data
evidence, is the departure ofthe BSW faction purged Die Linke
(55:45):
of some of the elements thatprogressive-leaning people in
West Germany found mostobjectionable about Die Linke.
It purged people with viewsconsidered fringy, views
sympathetic to Vladimir Putin'sposition in the current war in
Ukraine.
people with anti-vax views, andother populist
(56:06):
anti-establishment views thatare viewed as fringe or
unscientific by people in themainstream.
The remaining portion of Delinkawas socially progressive,
including on issues like LGBTrights, feminism, and also
campaigned on a strong platformof economic redistribution and
taxing the rich.
Unlike CDU, Delinka definitelydid not promote a message of
(56:30):
increasing defense spending andincreasing military aid to
Ukraine.
Delinka is still fairlypacifist.
They want to increase socialspending, but not defense
spending.
But they purged the explicitlypro-Russia element from their
party.
Basically, a lot of left-leaningvoters in West Germany who are
(56:51):
fed up with the status quo,people who usually vote for the
Social Democrats and the Greens,apparently were attracted to
Delinka, which allowed Delinkato expand beyond its base in
East Germany and make up for theground lost by those voters who
went toward the BSW.
The most ironic election resultmay have been the decline of the
(57:12):
Free Democrats, or FDP, who hadtriggered the breakup of the
traffic light coalition byrefusing to agree with the
Greens and SPD on a budget.
One assumes they thought forcinga new election would benefit
them, but instead ChristianLindner's pro-business party did
so poorly that they missed the5% cutoff and are out of the
(57:34):
Bundestag entirely after thiselection.
Two more big things need to bediscussed before we finally end
this interminable episode.
First of all, the new divides inthe German electorate.
So the older the people are, asthey broke down the data from
the exit polls, older peopletended to be most likely to
(57:55):
support the two majortraditional parties, the Social
Democrats and the CDU.
Young people are really turningaway from those traditional
parties.
The other big thing, which isdefinitely concerning, is
polarization between men andwomen, particularly between
young men and young women.
(58:15):
And you may have heard thisstory about voting patterns in
the USA, including the lastpresidential election.
You have young men increasinglydrawn to the far right in the
German case toward the AFD, andyou have young women
increasingly drawn toward thefar left in this particular
German election, increasinglytoward Die Linke.
(58:36):
So if these trends continue, ifthese voting patterns continue
as those young people get older,we're going to see a much more
extreme German politics.
And that's a concern.
And I say this not just todefend moderation for
moderation's sake.
Not all of my views aremoderate.
But to say that when you look athistory during the Great
(58:57):
Depression, you had Germanpolitics have support for the
center parties completelycollapse and everything go
toward the extreme.
This is when you had communistsand Nazis fighting in the
streets led to a really badplace for Germany and for the
whole world.
For more information on that, Iwould recommend Richard J.
(59:17):
Evans' book.
He's a British historian.
He's very well regarded.
His book, The Coming of theThird Reich, covers this period
and will include a reading liston the Patreon.
The last thing I want to talkabout is the future of Europe.
The endorsement of J.D.
Vance and Donald Trump and ElonMusk of the AFD, which is seen
(59:37):
by probably the majority ofGermans as an extreme and
somewhat scary neo-fascistparty, really has shaken the
confidence that they cancontinue in their traditional
relationship with the UnitedStates as sort of their de facto
military protector under NATO.
And the biggest shock after theelection was Friedrich Merz
coming out and saying he wantsGermany to try to become
(01:00:00):
basically independent ofdepending on the USA for
military support.
So you're going to see a bigincrease in German military
spending.
One other thing I should mentionis what the upcoming coalition
government will actually looklike.
Despite the fact that the CDUpartnered with AFD on that one
bill, the CDU has said there isabsolutely no chance that they
(01:00:22):
would consider actually goinginto a coalition partnership
with the AFD.
They're considered most likelyto partner with the Social
Democrats.
That will be a bit awkward, butit's happened before in German
politics.
When the two main parties joinedtogether, they call that a grand
coalition.
So that's what we may see.
(01:00:44):
But back to the whole issue ofGerman defense spending, they've
already taken actions under sortof the lame duck government to
remove the debt break.
Basically, in the Germanpolitical system, they had put
in something that made it veryhard for them to go into debt.
They have this verystereotypically German obsession
with being fiscally prudent andbalancing their budgets.
(01:01:06):
They have a far lower percentageof government debt, for
instance, than the United Statesgovernment has.
And they have limits on how muchthey can go into debt, but
they're removing that so theycan do more defense spending.
So it'll be very interesting tosee what happens to the
relationship between the U.S.
and Germany, whether we seecontinued divergence, what we
(01:01:27):
see regarding these far-rightmovements in the future.
So I apologize for this longepisode, but I found this German
election really fascinating.
I hope you found it interestingas well.
We'll go back to normal episodeswith the normal production, the
normal music, the normalscripted content next time.
This episode was so different, Ihope you reach out and let me
(01:01:49):
know what you thought of it.
Remember, it'sboomertomillennialatoutlook.com.
Just a little postscript updatehere.
The Christian Democrats, or CDU,have indeed reached an agreement
to form a government incoalition with the Social
Democrats, also known as theSPD.
Friedrich Merz is set toofficially take over as
(01:02:12):
Chancellor on May 6th of 2025.
The German debt break hasn'tbeen completely removed, but it
has been quote-unquote eased toallow for more spending, much of
which will be spent on nationaldefense and support to Ukraine
because the current Americanregime has indicated its
(01:02:33):
intention to disinvest fromEuropean security.
We hope you've enjoyed thisCurrent Events related episode,
and we'll meet you back in theUSA of the 1960s in our next
episode.
Thank you so much for listening.
From Boomers to Millennials is a U.S.
history podcast?
This is episode 20B, entitledGerman Elections 2025.
It's a special supplementalepisode.
This is going to be a differentkind of episode than any we've
(00:21):
ever recorded, because I amtrying something different here.
I'm trying to do a non-scriptedepisode, which is very difficult
for me because typically Iprefer to carefully craft
everything I want to say in ascript, and now I feel like I'm
(00:42):
kind of working without a net.
But I do have an outline, ofcourse, to keep this from
getting too chaotic.
But this episode will be moreimprovised than usual.
more in a Dan Carlin style thana Mike Duncan style for all the
history podcast obsessives outthere.
(01:02):
But certainly I'm no Dan Carlin,who's a master of that style.
I've seen him in person talkingoff the cuff, and he's so good
at it.
I have a lot less experiencewith that type of thing.
So this is going to be aninteresting experiment, and it
definitely is going to involve alot more rambling from me.
(01:23):
I'm not going to be quite asfocused and eloquent as I
usually am, but please staytuned because I think this will
be a very interesting episode.
For one thing, it gives me theopportunity to get more content
out there before the end of thismonth.
The only caveat I would give isthat if you have zero interest
(01:45):
in current European geopolitics,This may not be the episode for
you.
And it is getting a bit awayfrom our main focus of US
history and particularly goingback to the 60s.
This is another current eventspodcast like the one we did at
the end of 2024, but itcertainly draws on historical
(02:07):
sources.
The long history between the USand Europe in the post-World War
II era and how that relationshipemerged during the Cold War
After the Cold War and now withthis current new phase where the
relationship between the UnitedStates and Europe seems to be
changing.
So that's part of why thisepisode is interesting.
(02:29):
And I do like to nerd out oninternational politics.
So this is something that I cantalk about extemporaneously
because I did follow the Germanelection pretty closely.
I'm in Europe right now.
I even know someone who voted inthe election, although not in
Germany.
I know a couple German people.
(02:50):
I've been paying more attentionto European media sources like
Deutsche Welle and BBC andthings like that to try to get
up to speed.
So maybe I can translate alittle bit and explain a little
bit to my mostly Americanlisteners how the German system
is different, maybe what we canlearn from it, and how the
(03:13):
recent changes to theirpolitical coalitions may affect
the future of the United Statesand the rest of the world, in
addition to the future ofEurope.
These recent German electionsare particularly significant, I
think, for two main reasons.
One is the global rise of thefar right all across Europe,
(03:34):
largely focused on anti-migrantsentiment.
other things as well, but Ithink the increased number of
people coming from Asia andAfrica into Europe has kind of
disrupted the political statusquo, has created a backlash, and
has allowed some of thesefar-right parties to emerge in
(03:54):
so many places.
You're looking at NationalRally, I think she's calling it
now, with Marine Le Pen inFrance.
You have Nigel Farage's movementin the UK.
You have Georgia Maloneyactually in power, albeit as
part of a coalition with ananti-migrant right-wing party in
Italy.
The most extreme example outsideof Russia is Viktor Orban in
(04:19):
Hungary, who has taken a verydifferent tack on many cultural
issues and foreign policy issuesthat are outside the mainstream
of the European Union.
and has aligned himself moreclosely with the far-right in
America, including Donald Trump,who gave a shout-out to Orban in
(04:41):
his debate with Kamala Harris.
I'm not sure a lot of Americansrecognize the reference to Orban
or knew who he is, but Trumpbragged about how much Viktor
Orban loves me.
So all this is to foregroundthat there's even a far-right
party in Germany which, forhistorical reasons...
(05:01):
People are extra nervous aboutthe extreme right in Germany.
That party is the alternativefor Deutschland party.
One of the big questions infront of these elections was,
there seemed to be this surge ofsupport for the AFD.
How big would it be?
How powerful would they get?
(05:21):
Would they actually have achance to get into government?
And what would that mean for theEU?
So that was one thing.
The second element was, thathung over everyone's head
awaiting this election inGermany is how the changing
relationship between the USA andthe EU would affect the outcome
(05:43):
because all of a sudden you'rehaving an administration in the
USA with the Trump-Vanceadministration that is more
hostile or at least skeptical tothe European Union and to NATO
saying Europe needs to carry itIt's weight.
They need to pay more for theirown defense.
(06:05):
J.D.
Vance really shocked some peoplewhen he made his first, I think
it was his first trip to Europe,and he went over there and
basically said Europeans don'tvalue free speech.
They're doing too muchcensorship of the far right.
He even said that the biggestthreat to Europe and its values
were from within, from like...
(06:27):
government censorship andintolerance of certain views
outside the mainstream.
And this is at a time whenpeople in some parts of Europe
feel potentially threatened byRussia.
You recently had Sweden andFinland, who had been neutral
for so long, finally joined NATObecause they were so freaked out
(06:49):
by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
And there are concerns aboutChina and other powers around
the world.
So it really shocked a lot ofpeople in Europe to have Vance
basically say, I have a lot ofproblems with with you people.
And I think, you know, you'redoing a lot of things wrong.
It was, you know, and you canhave a debate over what is free
(07:10):
speech and what is hate speechand what shouldn't shouldn't be
allowed.
Should you be able to post Nazistuff on public forums?
Well, in the USA, that's Totallylegal in Germany, not so much.
And we can have a debate aboutthat.
But it just seemed like a weirdthing to do for countries that
have been longtime U.S.
(07:31):
partners and allies to go overthere and be so critical of them
and their political systems.
So the rhetoric coming from thisnew administration, you know,
some of the speeches by Trumpand Vance about not liking what
the EU is doing and not beingsure about continuing on with
NATO and needing Europe to paymore and to take care of itself.
(07:54):
You have all that creatingdiplomatic uncertainty.
And then you have the tariffsissue creating economic
uncertainty in Europe.
The administration has been Ididn't expect a big...
(08:26):
international conflict withCanada.
There were a lot of things I sawpotentially on the horizon when
Trump won the election inNovember.
That came kind of out of theblue to me.
But today we're focusing onEurope.
So I'll stop rambling about thebackground to the election and
talk about the status quo inGermany before the election
(08:48):
started.
Because Thank you.
(09:14):
But many European countries havea very different political
structure to their system, whichmakes it far more conducive to
having a multi-party system.
And that's certainly the case inGermany.
Going into the recent election,Germany was governed by a
coalition of three parties.
The SPD, the Green Party, andthe FPD.
(09:37):
So first I'd like to tell you alittle bit about those parties.
The first one...
I want to get into is the SDP,which translates, or sorry, the
SPD.
It's very easy to get that mixedup because it translates to
Social Democratic Party.
But the actual full name, andI've never formally studied
(09:59):
German, so you really have tobear with me on these.
Its full name isSozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands.
So to understand the origins ofthe SPD, you need to go back to
19th century Germany.
And we won't do this much of adeep dive into every single
political party or we'll be hereall day.
(10:21):
But SPD emerged out of theworking class in Germany.
Like the United States, theGerman Empire industrialized
later than, for instance,Britain, which was where the
Industrial Revolution started.
So in the late 19th century, youhave this huge shift where all
(10:43):
these factories are opening upin Germany.
Many people are moving from thecountryside into the factories.
There's opportunities foradvancement, but also life is
very hard in the factories.
Many workers are dissatisfiedwith the dangerous conditions
and low pay.
So you start developing theseworking class movements.
(11:04):
And the SPD came out of thattime period.
And it contained some prettyradical elements, including
people who were influenced bythe ideas of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels about having aneventual socialist revolution.
And for that reason...
Under the Second Reich, whichwas the government of the German
(11:26):
Empire from the new unifiedGerman state that emerged in
1870 under the leadership ofChancellor Otto von Bismarck,
formerly ruled by Kaisers ormonarchs, basically, they
weren't really a democracy.
They did have a parliamentarybody that had a role, but there
was some limitations on thepower of the Social Democrats,
(11:48):
particularly because they wereconsidered to be a potentially
subversive force to the empire.
The rubber really hits the roadas to what kind of role the SPD
will play when you get to theoutbreak of World War I.
The question is, will thesocialists, and they were
considered not just socialdemocrats but outright
(12:10):
socialists at the time, will thesocialists support the war
effort for Germany?
And it was a big dilemma for theleaders because there was this
idea out there that workers inFrance, Germany, Britain,
wherever, have no reason to hateeach other for these petty
nationalistic differences.
And really, they should uniteagainst the upper classes rather
(12:34):
than fighting their brothers whohappen to be across a border.
Now, if you're a strongnationalist, that kind of
universalist rhetoric is goingto seem ridiculous to you.
But, you know, a lot ofsocialists believe that.
They believed in unity of theinternational working class.
But at the end of the day, whatends up happening in Germany and
in most other European countriesinvolved in the war is the
(12:57):
socialists largely go along withthe government and support the
war effort.
One major exception to that isin Russia, where unexpectedly
during World War I you have thefamous Russian Revolution in
1917.
And this becomes a majorflashpoint that really splits
the left throughout Europe.
(13:18):
Coming out of the RussianRevolution, the SPD splits into
different factions.
The more radical faction leavesand becomes the communists, and
the more moderate...
center-left faction remains inthe SPD.
And there was all kinds of dramabetween the Communists and the
Social Democrats in theaftermath of World War I right
(13:41):
up to into the 1930s.
I don't have time to get intoall that.
But the most important thing toknow is ever since then, the SPD
has been a party that appealedpredominantly to the urban
working class, but was morecenter-left, not a radical
party.
Now today, the SPD's support isstrongest in cities within what
(14:04):
was formerly the nation of WestGermany.
There's a big divide within thevarious parties over whether
they're more popular in the Westor in the East, which we'll get
into more as we discuss some ofthe other parties.
But the SPD's particularlypopular in areas of northwestern
Germany, like up near Hamburg,closer to Scandinavia, some of
(14:26):
the traditionally Protestantareas.
but also in areas far to thewest near the border of France.
These are more traditionallyCatholic areas, areas with the
industrialized Rhineland, areaslike Saarland, which was a
traditional kind of workingclass mining area, Cologne or
(14:46):
Cologne, cities like that.
They remain strong in thoseareas, but their base is aging.
Some of the younger people whoare more progressive and may
have traditionally voted withthe SPD have been attracted to
the Green Party and otherparties.
SPD nevertheless won the 2021German federal election with the
(15:07):
largest plurality vote of anyparty, defeating the CDU after
the departure of its longtimeleader, Angela Merkel.
Merkel's potential successorlost the election to Olaf
Scholz, the current chancellorof Germany, very soon to lose
that role, as we'll explain, dueto the results of the election.
But Olaf Scholz has been thechancellor.
(15:28):
He's considered moderate,pragmatic, a bit boring, even by
German standards.
And his party would benegatively affected by
dissatisfaction with the statusquo in the recent elections.
Now then we get to the nextparty, the Green Party.
The Social Democrats, theGreens, and the Free Democrats
(15:50):
were together in what was calledthe Traffic Light Coalition.
This refers to the colors of therespective parties.
The Social Democrats' officialcolor is red.
The Green Party is, shocker, asgreen as its official color.
And the Free Democrats haveyellow as their official color.
So in this very cutesydesignation, they call this the
(16:12):
Traffic Light Coalition becauseit's like the colors on a
traffic light.
The Green Party emerged in WestGermany out of the activism
related to environmental issuesthat came out of the 1960s and
1970s.
They were founded in 1980.
Now at the time, there was a bigconcern not only about
(16:32):
pollution, Germany was a veryindustrialized country where
that was a major issue, but alsowith other environmental threats
such as nuclear waste and ageneral fear also of nuclear
weapons.
In the early 80s, there was thishuge no-nukes movement in
Europe.
This was against a backdropwhere you have...
(16:55):
The Cold War getting very scaryfor the final time, really, in
the early 1980s.
You have Reagan coming to powerin the USA.
You have Margaret Thatchercoming to power in the UK.
These leaders take a moreaggressive tone.
They invest in a lot of weaponssystems, including more nuclear
weapons.
And the Soviets respond in kind.
(17:18):
Actually, the Soviets during the1980s created a really scary
biological weapons program.
If you want to learn more aboutthat, you can read David
Hoffman's book, The Dead Hand.
I will include on our Patreonsite a list of recommended
reading related to this episode.
(17:40):
Anyway, the Greens become aninfluential party based on
environmental concerns andopposition to...
nuclear waste, nuclear power,and the proliferation of nuclear
weapons.
Unsurprisingly, currently theirmain focus is climate change.
They're generally considered, orcenter-left, so how are they
different from the center-leftSPD?
(18:02):
Well, a lot of it has to do withtheir base.
Their base tends to be a bityounger than the SPD and a bit
more upwardly mobile, I wouldsay.
They're very big in collegetowns in the western part of
Germany.
A lot of young professionals areattracted to them.
Their views are what we in theUnited States would call
socially liberal in terms ofattitudes toward immigration,
(18:26):
LGBT issues, things like that.
An example of a situation wherethe Greens and the Social
Democrats might come intoconflict is, for instance,
maintaining jobs in a factorythat is polluting the
atmosphere.
The Social Democrats, who havethe support of the unionized
laborers who work at thatfactory, might say, hey, we need
(18:47):
to keep that factory open,whereas the Greens might say,
no, it isn't worth the damageit's doing to the environment
that factory needs to close.
So those are some of thetensions that could come up.
But generally, both of theseparties are left-leaning, so it
kind of makes sense for them togo into coalition together.
That brings us to the thirdmember of the Traffic Light
(19:08):
Coalition, kind of the oddball,which is the Free Democrats.
FPD officially stands for FreieDemokratische Partei.
Again, pardon my terribleGerman.
This is basically a classicallyliberal party, liberal in the
sense of favoring free marketsand free trade.
(19:29):
If you go back to episode 13a ofour podcast entitled Defining
Liberalism, We did a deep diveinto the meaning of the term
liberalism and how it emerged asmeaning something different in
Europe versus in the UnitedStates.
So this is more the Europeandefinition of liberal, which is
(19:50):
to the right of what isconsidered liberal in North
America.
Generally, the supporters of theFPD are socially or culturally
more liberal, but in terms ofeconomics, they're more
pro-business.
I think they're supported by alot of entrepreneurial people,
(20:11):
people who own small businesses,people who are trying to work
their way up the corporateladder and are frustrated by
government red tape.
I wouldn't necessarily call themlibertarian because there's
almost no one in Europe that isso viscerally anti-government as
American libertarians are.
But they're kind of leaning in aslightly libertarian direction.
(20:34):
While the Free Democrats may seeeye to eye with their coalition
partners and the SocialDemocrats and the Green Party on
some issues regarding maybeimmigration policy or other
cultural issues, clearly thisgroup has the biggest cause to
come into conflict with theother parties on economic
(20:56):
issues.
because the other parties in thetraffic-like coalition usually
want more regulation across theboard, whereas the Free
Democrats tend to want less.
Unsurprisingly, it was the FPDthat finally blew up the
coalition because they did notfind the budget that the other
two parties were pushing for tobe acceptable.
(21:19):
The leader of the FreeDemocrats, a guy named Christian
Linder, basically led the effortto pull out of the coalition,
and that is what triggered theneed to have the recent
election.
The largest opposition partyoutside of the main governing
coalition is the CDU, theChristian Democratic Union.
This is a center-right party,and it has dominated German
(21:43):
politics for most of the 21stcentury.
Christian Democratic partiesemerged in the aftermath of
World War II The far right,particularly the fascistic
movements, obviously had beendiscredited.
Christian democratic partiesfilled the vacuum of being
conservative parties that wantedto protect traditional ways of
(22:06):
life, the traditional role ofChristianity in Europe, but
which also wanted to supportdemocracy.
Christian democratic partiestended to support the creation
of welfare states in post-warEurope, but favored a more
limited version than thatproposed by the Social
Democrats.
They were supported bytraditionally religious people
(22:29):
in small towns and rural areas,and they were especially strong
in Catholic areas.
But despite having the wordChristian in its name, the
modern CDU is definitely not atheocratic party in an
increasingly secular Germany.
It isn't trying to ban abortionor follow other parts of the
(22:50):
agenda of the USA's so-calledChristian right.
In the 21st century, the GermanCDU has stood for fiscal
discipline, free trade, andclose ties with the EU and NATO.
It is basically a pragmaticcentrist party that tweaks the
status quo just enough tomaintain the trust of its aging
(23:12):
supporters.
In fact, their most successfulpolitician, Angela Merkel...
due to her stance on migrationand the fact that she didn't get
along so well with George W.
Bush and Donald Trump.
Many Americans probably wouldhave assumed she was more on the
left side of the politicalspectrum, but that's not the
(23:32):
case.
The Christian Democrats are morefiscally conservative.
They want a balanced budget.
In Germany, they pushedausterity policies for both
their own country and across theEU.
In terms of foreign policy, theyhave a strong tradition of being
militantly anti-communist.
(23:54):
In many countries, they wereassociated with the Catholic
Church's strong stance againstcommunism during the Cold War.
There is this strange elementalso where the Christian
Democrats...
governed in partnership withsort of a subsidiary called the
Christian Social Union, which isthe party that dominates in the
(24:14):
very Catholic region of Bavariain the southwest of Germany.
That's where Munich is.
It's where BMW comes from,obviously.
And it's kind of a one-partyregion, obviously.
And usually when one partydominates, you think there's
something shady going on andthings aren't really democratic.
But democracy in Germany,including in Bavaria, seems
(24:36):
quite robust.
It just seems that the CSU issuper popular there.
That's a very prosperous regionin Germany.
So things are going well.
The population figures, if it'snot broke, don't fix it.
I should point out the ChristianDemocrats are not only popular
in Catholic areas, and they'renot as explicitly affiliated
(24:59):
with the Catholic side ofChristianity as, say, their
equivalents in countries likeItaly would tend to be.
So they don't have a sectarianaffiliation, and they have many
Protestant supporters intraditionally Protestant parts
of Germany.
Europe is generally a lot lessreligious than it used to be.
(25:20):
The percentage of people whoattend church has been declining
for decades.
So I'm fairly certain you don'tneed to explicitly be Christian
or self-identify as Christian tobe in the CDU.
So this is a party that secularpeople very much participate in
and can feel comfortable in,despite its Christian roots and
ideological origins.
(25:41):
Angela Merkel was reallyarguably the great centrist
politician of the 21st centuryin Europe.
Although she wasn'ttraditionally charismatic, for a
time she was wildly popular andwidely trusted by the German
public.
Even those critical of herpolicies can acknowledge her
incredible political talents,but probably the most
(26:02):
controversial thing she ever didregarded the migrant crisis.
In the aftermath of the USA's2003 decision to invade Iraq,
the country devolved into chaosand insurrection.
and US troops were stuckfighting there for years.
When Barack Obama came in in2009, he fulfilled his campaign
(26:24):
promise of largely pulling UStroops out of Iraq.
Unfortunately, the aftermath ofthe chaos caused by the US
toppling of the Iraqi regime I'mnot here to defend Saddam
Hussein or anything, buttoppling that regime did create
a power vacuum and cascadingchaos across the region.
And that's what you see happen.
(26:46):
You see things destabilizepolitically in Iraq and Syria,
which led to the rise of scarygroups like ISIS and a lot of
internal fighting and civil war.
And that creates a lot ofsuffering, misery, and people
fleeing up through Turkey intothe EU.
At the height of the migrantcrisis in 2015, Merkel agreed to
(27:09):
accept over half a millionasylum seekers, most of them
from the Middle East, forhumanitarian reasons.
Political backlash over thisdecision became strong by early
2016, following reports thatlarge groups of migrant men had
attacked women on New Year's Eve2015 in Cologne, Germany.
(27:33):
While most immigrants werelaw-abiding, the small portion
of them involved in crime orterrorist incidents became a
major talking point for agrowing far-right movement.
And that leads us to the secondbiggest opposition party, the
AFD, which emerged in theaftermath of the migrant crisis.
(27:54):
The AFD is the Alternative forDeutschland party.
It was founded in 2013.
They differ with thecenter-right CDU in a couple of
areas.
For one thing, they're more of aEuroskeptic party, which means
they're skeptical of allianceslike the EU and NATO.
Traditionally, the center-rightCDU was very strongly supportive
(28:17):
of those alliances, verystrongly supportive of a
partnership with the U.S.
and the reliance on the U.S.
for military protection, as theU.S.
has several military bases inGermany, and this has allowed
Germany to avoid spending a tonof money on defense.
There's a lot of unease, bothinside of Germany and throughout
(28:38):
Europe, about the Germany beingheavily militarized because a
large percentage of thecountries in Europe were at one
point or another invaded oroccupied by Germans during the
20th century.
So letting the USA carry thatburden was a compromise that
seemed to work out well foreverybody.
Although it's increasingly onethe Americans in the aftermath
(29:00):
of the Cold War are questioning.
But for the AFD, they wantsomething different.
They want Germany to more go italone, Germany for the Germans,
because they are highlynationalistic as a far-right
party.
They were founded in oppositionto migration, so they're very
anti-immigrant.
They want Germans to be able tofeel more proud of being German.
(29:23):
This includes less guilt overGermany's history, including the
Second World War, the Holocaust,things like that.
So it probably won't shock youto hear that some of the more
extreme neo-fascist or neo-Nazielements in Germany have been
attracted to this party and havehad affiliations with this
(29:46):
party.
The really interesting and kindof puzzling thing about the AfD
is their role as a regionalparty, because they are far more
popular in the formerlycommunist eastern part of
Germany than they are in thewest.
Now let's flashback for a minuteto 1989.
The Berlin Wall comes down.
(30:08):
East Germany and West Germanyhad been apart for over 40
years.
The East Germans lived under acommunist dictatorship.
They dealt with a heavy-handedsecret police known as the
Stasi.
By the time of Germanreunification in 1990, it seemed
most people in East Germany didwant to move away from communism
(30:30):
and reunite with the West.
There was a merger of East andWest, but generally it was the
East being folded into the WestGerman capitalistic democratic
system.
Communist East Germany laggedbehind prosperous capitalist
West Germany economically.
West Germany had all thesesuccessful companies and was one
(30:53):
of the most prosperous countriesin Europe.
My understanding is that theGerman government Once Germany
reunited into one country, theytried to make a lot of efforts
to invest in formerly communistEast Germany and bring them up
to speed and a greater degree ofparity with the West.
But despite all these efforts,ultimately over 40 years of
(31:16):
being under totally differentsystems has just proven really
difficult to completely undo.
So to this day, on a whole listof economic factors,
unemployment rate, per capitaincome, number of cars per
household, a significant gapbetween East and West Germany
remains in place.
(31:37):
The continued economic problemsin the East have led its
population to have a lot ofpolitical frustration.
And in recent years, some haveturned to the far-right AFD
party to express this.
Obviously, the far right hasappealed to a lot of downwardly
mobile, economicallymarginalized people in other
places, including in the UnitedStates.
(31:59):
It gives those people somethingto be proud of, their national
identity.
It gives them people to blamefor their problems, which is
often elites and foreigners.
The most confusing thing aboutwhy the AfD has been so popular
in the East, however, is thereare way more immigrants and
migrants in the West than thereare in the East.
(32:20):
So it's a bit of a puzzle.
But for whatever the reason, theAfD has become more and more
popular in the former EastGermany.
Now, if you're going to try tobe successful as a far-right
nationalist party in 21stcentury Germany, one huge
obstacle you're going to face isthat, due to the history of the
Third Reich...
which ultimately ended indisaster for Germany and led the
(32:43):
Germans to be perceived.
Most of us would agree that atleast under the Nazis, the
Germans were among the mainvillains of the 20th century.
In the aftermath of World WarII, the Germans wanted to move
away from all that.
They wanted to become apeaceful, prosperous, democratic
country.
They wanted to move away frommilitarism and
hyper-nationalism.
(33:04):
As a result...
People are taught in schoolsacross Germany of the dangers
and the risks of extremenationalism.
So if you're a party like theAfD, how do you avoid the label
of being the breeding grounds ofa new Hitler?
Well, one way is you can pick aleader who no one would confuse
with Hitler if she were walkingdown the Strasse.
(33:26):
The AFD's current leader, AliceWeidel, is openly lesbian, and
her domestic partner is anon-white woman originally from
Sri Lanka.
So clearly someone like that isnot easy to label as a Nazi with
the associations we have withNazis being racist, homophobic,
etc.
(33:47):
Weidel is not representative ofher party's predominantly
struggling male East German basein other ways, too.
She is a financially successfulwoman, a former banker from West
Germany.
She has portrayed Muslimimmigrants as a threat to
women's rights and LGBT rights.
(34:09):
Now, Islamist terrorism hasbecome a salient issue in Europe
ever since 9-11 and the start ofthe U.S.-led War on Terror.
In 2004 and 2005, bombingsoccurred in Spain and in the UK
that killed a total of 249people.
(34:29):
They seem to have been partiallymotivated by those governments'
support of the American invasionof Iraq.
Then, between January 2015 andAugust 2017, There was another
shocking wave of attacks, mostof which were committed by
members and supporters of ISIS.
(34:52):
These attacks occurred in Paris,Brussels, Nice, Berlin,
Manchester, and Barcelona.
Over 330 civilians were killedin this surge of Islamist
terrorism.
And it is understandable thatthese events, coinciding with
more refugees coming into Europeduring the migrant crisis, was
(35:13):
something that createdwidespread public concern.
However, it is worth rememberingthat most of the migrants were
themselves fleeing the violenceof groups like ISIS.
Also, it should be noted thatthere have been no more attacks
that killed over 10 people since2017, although there have been
some smaller attacks.
(35:34):
This decrease in terrorismoccurred despite the continued
presence of Middle Easternimmigrants and refugees in
Europe.
But parties like the AFD stillsee them as a threat, if not to
Europeans' immediate physicalsecurity, then a threat to their
culture, economic well-being,and way of life.
(35:55):
It's important to point out nowthat I've mentioned that there
have actually been incidents ofviolence by extreme Islamist
groups in Europe since the startof the 21st century, that
Muslims are not a politicalmonolith.
Just because someone is a devoutMuslim doesn't necessarily mean
they're trying to oppose theirviews on non-Muslims or trying
(36:17):
to promote a theocratic agendaany more than all Christians are
trying to promote a theocraticagenda.
Moreover, the Arab and Muslimpopulations that have come to
Europe in recent decades havedifferent degrees of
religiosity, various types ofpolitical and cultural views.
This idea that Muslims are goingto take over and force Western
(36:40):
women to cover their heads, I'mnot aware of a single example of
that ever happening anywhere inEurope.
At least it hasn't happenedunless you go back to the
invasions of the Ottoman Empireor something.
But nevertheless, the bogeymanof an Islamic takeover of Europe
is something that fuelsfar-right sentiment.
(37:02):
So let's get back to the AFD.
The AFD in previous nationalelections have captured 12-15%
of the overall vote, But thething that many people found
alarming across Europe was thatin the most recent polls, the
AFD was looking like they weregoing to get over 20% of the
(37:22):
vote.
And the big question was, couldthey actually be brought into
the government?
In many European countries,there's this whole idea of a
firewall or a cordon sanitaire,as the French would say, to keep
potential neo-fascist elementsout of government.
And in many countries...
The center-left, the moderates,and the center-right all agreed
(37:43):
we should not work withextreme-right parties.
But the more successful thefar-right parties become, the
more tempting it's going to be,particularly for center-right
parties, to go into coalitionwith them.
because that can be thedifference between the
center-right party being shutout of government power to being
part of the governing coalition.
(38:04):
For instance, in Sweden, thefirewall has broken down.
The current governing coalitionin Sweden is center-right, but
in order to beat the SocialDemocrats who have traditionally
dominated the political scene inpost-World War II Sweden, the
center and center-right partiesmade a deal with the far-right
anti-migrant Sweden Democrats.
(38:25):
Technically, the SwedenDemocrats are not part of the
governing coalition, but theyare defined as like partners who
voted for the center-rightcoalition and allowed it to
become a governing majority.
So you're seeing these thingsbreak down across Europe.
Concerns about a weakeningfirewall in Germany grew during
2023.
(38:46):
when it was revealed that AFDofficials had secretly met with
far-right leaders and discusseda plan to deport not only
resident aliens, but also Germancitizens with an immigrant
background.
Before the 2025 federalelections, AFD nevertheless
seemed to be growing morepopular than ever, according to
(39:07):
the opinion polls.
Okay, so that's more than enoughinformation about the far-right
and the AFD.
So let's move to the other mainopposition parties, which are
more on the left extreme ofGerman politics.
In the post-reunification era,Die Linke has traditionally been
(39:28):
considered the most left-wingparty.
They currently identify as ademocratic socialist party.
The most controversial thingabout Die Linke is their origins
in East Germany.
They emerged out of the remnantsof the Communist Party of East
Germany.
There were even some communistEast German politicians who then
(39:50):
became successful politiciansunder democracy, affiliating
with Die Linke.
Die Linke literally means theleft in German, if I'm not
mistaken.
Like the AFD, Die Linke has beendisproportionately popular in
Eastern Germany.
Now didn't the population offormerly communist East Germany
(40:12):
openly rebel against thecommunist regime at the end of
the Cold War?
Didn't they want to become partof the West and be incorporated
into West Germany's capitalistdemocratic system?
Well, for the most part, theanswer is yes, but these things
are complicated.
Many older people lost theirjobs and their social status
(40:32):
during the transition tocapitalism.
and a significant number of EastGermans developed a nostalgia
for the old system.
There is a good German film madeback in 2003 called Goodbye
Lenin that deals with thisnostalgia issue.
There genuinely was a populationwithin the former East that
thought at least some thingswere better under the old
(40:54):
system.
Usually they didn't necessarilywant the Stasi back or to
rebuild the wall or anythinglike that.
But they did advocate for someof these farther left policies,
which led to the popularity ofDie Linke in some of these
places.
Meanwhile, Die Linke's roots inEast German communism made even
left-leaning people in the partof Germany that was under the
(41:17):
capitalistic democraticgovernment of West Germany very
nervous about voting for DieLinke.
Their strong association withEast Germany, the fact that they
incorporated politicians fromits authoritarian communist
system made them absolutelypolitically toxic to a lot of
people in West Germany, evenvery left-leaning people.
(41:39):
So a lot of left-leaning peoplewould support the leftmost wing
of the Social Democrats, theSPD, or would support the Green
Party or some other party.
Now, both of the major partiesin post-World War II Germany,
which is the Social Democratsand the Christian Democrats,
have traditionally been verysupportive of NATO and also the
(42:00):
EU.
They were very supportive ofGermany's alliance with the USA,
although under SPD leadership,Germany did decline to
participate in the coalitionthat invaded Iraq in 2003.
Otherwise, the main two partieshave been big supporters of
international cooperation andaffiliation with the other
(42:21):
countries of the WesternDemocratic Bloc.
This is another area whereD-Link has been different.
They've been more Euro-skeptic,which means more skeptical of
the EU, and they have been hometo some explicitly pro-Russian
elements, people who side morewith Vladimir Putin's Russia
than with, for instance, theUnited States.
(42:43):
in recent geopoliticalconflicts.
So this is another thing thatmakes people in West Germany
traditionally be pretty queasyabout Die Linke and not being
open to supporting them.
After all, East Germany was kindof a puppet state of Russia when
it was the Soviet Union, and nowwe see this party with partially
(43:04):
communist origins still havingthese pro-Russian leanings.
However, in recent years, DieLinke faced another big problem.
With the rise of the AfD in theEast, they were increasingly
losing market share.
They were losing part of theirsupport base from the far-left
party to the far-right party.
As strange as that may be, theredefinitely were voters who made
(43:28):
that journey in the former EastGermany.
Internal tensions finally led afaction within Die Linke to
split off and form their ownparty.
This faction was led by a formerdelinquent politician by the
name of Sarah Wagenknecht.
She created a new party,modestly named after herself,
(43:49):
called the Bundes-SarahWagenknecht, or BSW, which
apparently translates intoEnglish as the Sarah Wagenknecht
Alliance.
Now, it seems to me that a bigpart of the motivation behind
the BSW is was to kind of try torecapture some of those voters
(44:11):
who had gone over to the AFD.
So the BSW favors left-wingeconomic policies, more generous
benefits for citizens from thegovernment, but the BSW also
took more conservative views oncultural issues, especially
migration.
The BSW position is that Germanyshould be taking far fewer
(44:34):
migrants in.
They've also staked out moreconservative positions on issues
like LGBT rights.
I believe the BSW isparticularly skeptical of trans
rights.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, giventhese cultural views, the BSW
also has absorbed those formermembers of Dylanka who are most
(44:56):
skeptical of NATO, mostsympathetic to Putin's Russia.
So the BSW has emerged as thisparty that seems to be
tailor-made toward a lot ofpeople in the former East
Germany who are more culturallyconservative but need more
economic help from thegovernment.
The polls heading into the 2025election showed that the BSW is
(45:18):
getting more than 5% of thenational vote, which would give
them a position within theBundestag, within the
legislature of Germany.
These polls also showed BSWexceeding the percentage being
earned by the remaining portionof Die Linke.
So for a time prior to theelection, it looked like Die
(45:38):
Linke may basically be a spentforce politically and would be
replaced by this weird kind ofleft conservative hybrid party,
the BSW.
So now let's discuss theconditions immediately before
the election.
Olaf Scholz and the GoverningCoalition...
had become very unpopular.
(45:58):
A big part of this was some ofthe same economic turmoil that
provoked a lot of backlashagainst the Biden administration
and the USA.
Complaints about risinginflation, the cost of living,
the increasing cost of housing.
As the global economy hasundergone these aftershocks of
(46:21):
the COVID-19 pandemic andeverything it did to the supply
chain, We've been going throughthese waves of inflation.
All around the world, we've seenso much anti-status quo
political sentiment and all thispopulist anti-establishment
energy.
And Germany is certainly noexception to that.
Part of that populist energyincludes skepticism about
(46:44):
letting in more migrants.
While there are some people whoadvocate for an extreme
position...
such as having a totally openborder on the one hand or
closing off national borderscompletely to all immigrants on
the other, mainstream Europeanpolitical parties generally
accept the premise that theywill have to screen potential
(47:06):
newcomers, letting in somemigrants and deporting others.
Among both center-right andcenter-left parties, The general
trend in recent years has beentoward adopting stricter
criteria and thus admittingfewer immigrants.
This policy shift has takenplace in part out of a reaction
(47:26):
to the rise of hardline,far-right anti-migrant parties
all across Europe.
While many agree it is necessaryto adopt these tougher policies
to limit the appeal ofextreme-right parties with
authoritarian tendencies...
Some, mostly on the left,express concern that this will
cause mainstream partiesthemselves to become more
(47:49):
extreme and intolerant.
So this is pretty complicated.
With growing anti-migrantsentiment in European countries
including Germany, the CDU, thecenter-right party we discussed
before, which was leading in thepolls, but was facing the AFD in
their rearview mirror, with theAFD in second place.
(48:12):
So it's understandable that theCDU was tempted to pivot to the
right on immigration, and that'sexactly what they did.
The CDU, under the leadership oftheir candidate, Friedrich Merz,
came out in favor of tougherlaws against illegal immigration
and more restrictions onmigration.
And in January of this year,they pushed a bill in the
(48:33):
Bundestag that would implementthose policies.
Now, there was a convention thatmainstream parties, due to the
firewall, should never openlywelcome or seek out the support
of the extreme far-right party,the AFD.
But in the case of this bill,that's exactly what the CDU did.
They welcomed the support of theAFD in passing this bill.
(48:56):
This is where DeLinka comes backinto our picture.
Even after some members haddeparted to form the BSW, Die
Linke still had a small numberof representatives in the
Bundestag in January of 2025.
One of their leaders was a36-year-old woman named Heidi
Reichenick.
She gave a fiery speech thatcondemned the CDU's
(49:19):
collaboration with the AFD onthe anti-immigrant bill, and she
warned that fascists were nowbeing allowed to participate in
German governance for the firsttime since World War II.
Heidi Reichenach did not looklike a stereotypical German
politician.
Her short sleeves showed hertattoos.
including a tattoo of RosaLuxemburg, a German communist
(49:43):
who was murdered by a right-wingmilitia during a revolutionary
uprising in Berlin during thechaotic aftermath of World War
I.
The speech by the charismatic,red-haired Heidi Reichenach went
viral in Germany.
This attention failed to dampenthe support for the CDU and the
support for the AFD in theupcoming election.
(50:06):
But what it did do was turnaround the political fortunes of
the seemingly doomed Die LinkeParty.
The German election was held onFebruary 23rd, 2025.
They have a very interestingsystem.
They have something called theWahlenmacht, which is developed
by German political scientists,I believe with government
(50:27):
support, where citizens can goin, answer a bunch of questions,
and it matches them up with thepolitical party that most
matches their beliefs.
The Volomat is available on awebsite and as a mobile phone
app.
Another key difference withGermany being a multi-party
parliamentary system usingproportional representation is
(50:49):
that voters vote not onlybetween the specific candidates
in their district, they alsocast a general vote for one of
the major political parties inGermany.
After all of the actual regionalrepresentatives are elected, the
German system uses the overallresults in these votes for the
(51:11):
parties to bring in additionalmembers off something called the
party list in order to make surethat the Bundestag more
accurately represents the viewsof the German general public.
Let me try to explain this alittle more clearly.
Let's say that in the next U.S.
congressional election, assumingthat takes place, Let's say that
(51:33):
the public gets fed up with themain two parties, the
Republicans and the Democrats.
And in every singlecongressional district across
the nation, 10% of the voterssupport the Libertarian Party
and 10% support the Green Party.
That would result in exactlyzero representatives in Congress
(51:54):
from either of those parties.
Because if you don't have thebiggest plurality in any
individual district, you don'tget represented.
It's a first-past-the-post,winner-take-all system.
So unless the Greens or theLibertarians can actually come
in first place in one of thesedistricts, they aren't going to
get any congressionalrepresentatives.
(52:15):
However, under the Germanproportional representation
system, if 10% of Americans casttheir congressional vote for the
Libertarian Party, then 10% ofthe members of Congress are
going to be from the LibertarianParty.
Now, you can probably see theappeal of this as a system that
maybe more accurately reflectsthe political views of the
(52:36):
public, but that's not thesystem the USA has.
So after all this buildup, let'stalk about what actually
happened in the 2025 Germanelections.
As expected, the CDU was theparty that got the biggest chunk
of the vote.
They only got 29%, but that's abig chunk in a system with so
many parties.
(52:57):
Friedrich Merz...
will be the next chancellor ofGermany.
Actually, he may be already.
I'm not sure where they are inthe coalition talks.
There was a big concern I heardamong some pundits that the AFD
might do even better thanexpected in the polls.
We've seen some of theseright-wing populist movements
(53:17):
and politicians be undercountedin polling, theoretically
because some people don't wantto admit that they're going to
vote for the right-wingpopulist.
We saw polling underestimatesupport for Brexit in the United
Kingdom.
We saw polling underestimatesupport for Donald Trump in U.S.
presidential elections.
It's happened all three timeshe's run.
(53:38):
He's outperformed the polling.
But the AFD in this case did notoutperform their polling, at
least not by much.
They were estimated to get about20%.
They got 21%.
Probably not enough that wouldin any way tempt the CDU to
actually coalition with them.
In third place, you have theformerly leading party, the SPD,
(54:02):
getting only a little over 16%of the vote, one of their worst
performances in history.
I mentioned that Olaf Scholz,the incumbent SPD chancellor,
was quite unpopular.
You also saw the Green Partyfinish fourth, and the Greens
saw a decline in their voteshare.
(54:22):
They only got 12%.
They may not make it into thenext coalition.
In fourth place, with 9% of thevote, you have Die Linke, co-led
by Jan van Aken and HeidiReikeneck, who I mentioned
before.
In the back of the pack, we haveSarah Wagenknecht's BSW party
(54:43):
and Christian Lindner's FDP.
Both of these parties got above4% of the vote, but below 5%.
And that is a hugely significantnumber.
Let me explain why.
You have to get a minimum of 5%of the national vote to get
seats within the Bundestag.
(55:04):
So both the BSW and the FPD areout of the German parliament for
this next cycle.
In polls during 2024, it lookedlike the new left conservative
hybrid BSW party wouldessentially take away part of
the former DeLinca support,getting over the 5% threshold,
(55:24):
while DeLinca was polling below5%.
But instead of BSW shuttingDeLinca out of the government,
it looks like the oppositehappened.
Allow me to explain why thatmight be.
My big theory here, and I thinkit's backed up by the data
evidence, is the departure ofthe BSW faction purged Die Linke
(55:45):
of some of the elements thatprogressive-leaning people in
West Germany found mostobjectionable about Die Linke.
It purged people with viewsconsidered fringy, views
sympathetic to Vladimir Putin'sposition in the current war in
Ukraine.
people with anti-vax views, andother populist
(56:06):
anti-establishment views thatare viewed as fringe or
unscientific by people in themainstream.
The remaining portion of Delinkawas socially progressive,
including on issues like LGBTrights, feminism, and also
campaigned on a strong platformof economic redistribution and
taxing the rich.
Unlike CDU, Delinka definitelydid not promote a message of
(56:30):
increasing defense spending andincreasing military aid to
Ukraine.
Delinka is still fairlypacifist.
They want to increase socialspending, but not defense
spending.
But they purged the explicitlypro-Russia element from their
party.
Basically, a lot of left-leaningvoters in West Germany who are
(56:51):
fed up with the status quo,people who usually vote for the
Social Democrats and the Greens,apparently were attracted to
Delinka, which allowed Delinkato expand beyond its base in
East Germany and make up for theground lost by those voters who
went toward the BSW.
The most ironic election resultmay have been the decline of the
(57:12):
Free Democrats, or FDP, who hadtriggered the breakup of the
traffic light coalition byrefusing to agree with the
Greens and SPD on a budget.
One assumes they thought forcinga new election would benefit
them, but instead ChristianLindner's pro-business party did
so poorly that they missed the5% cutoff and are out of the
(57:34):
Bundestag entirely after thiselection.
Two more big things need to bediscussed before we finally end
this interminable episode.
First of all, the new divides inthe German electorate.
So the older the people are, asthey broke down the data from
the exit polls, older peopletended to be most likely to
(57:55):
support the two majortraditional parties, the Social
Democrats and the CDU.
Young people are really turningaway from those traditional
parties.
The other big thing, which isdefinitely concerning, is
polarization between men andwomen, particularly between
young men and young women.
(58:15):
And you may have heard thisstory about voting patterns in
the USA, including the lastpresidential election.
You have young men increasinglydrawn to the far right in the
German case toward the AFD, andyou have young women
increasingly drawn toward thefar left in this particular
German election, increasinglytoward Die Linke.
(58:36):
So if these trends continue, ifthese voting patterns continue
as those young people get older,we're going to see a much more
extreme German politics.
And that's a concern.
And I say this not just todefend moderation for
moderation's sake.
Not all of my views aremoderate.
But to say that when you look athistory during the Great
(58:57):
Depression, you had Germanpolitics have support for the
center parties completelycollapse and everything go
toward the extreme.
This is when you had communistsand Nazis fighting in the
streets led to a really badplace for Germany and for the
whole world.
For more information on that, Iwould recommend Richard J.
(59:17):
Evans' book.
He's a British historian.
He's very well regarded.
His book, The Coming of theThird Reich, covers this period
and will include a reading liston the Patreon.
The last thing I want to talkabout is the future of Europe.
The endorsement of J.D.
Vance and Donald Trump and ElonMusk of the AFD, which is seen
(59:37):
by probably the majority ofGermans as an extreme and
somewhat scary neo-fascistparty, really has shaken the
confidence that they cancontinue in their traditional
relationship with the UnitedStates as sort of their de facto
military protector under NATO.
And the biggest shock after theelection was Friedrich Merz
coming out and saying he wantsGermany to try to become
(01:00:00):
basically independent ofdepending on the USA for
military support.
So you're going to see a bigincrease in German military
spending.
One other thing I should mentionis what the upcoming coalition
government will actually looklike.
Despite the fact that the CDUpartnered with AFD on that one
bill, the CDU has said there isabsolutely no chance that they
(01:00:22):
would consider actually goinginto a coalition partnership
with the AFD.
They're considered most likelyto partner with the Social
Democrats.
That will be a bit awkward, butit's happened before in German
politics.
When the two main parties joinedtogether, they call that a grand
coalition.
So that's what we may see.
(01:00:44):
But back to the whole issue ofGerman defense spending, they've
already taken actions under sortof the lame duck government to
remove the debt break.
Basically, in the Germanpolitical system, they had put
in something that made it veryhard for them to go into debt.
They have this verystereotypically German obsession
with being fiscally prudent andbalancing their budgets.
(01:01:06):
They have a far lower percentageof government debt, for
instance, than the United Statesgovernment has.
And they have limits on how muchthey can go into debt, but
they're removing that so theycan do more defense spending.
So it'll be very interesting tosee what happens to the
relationship between the U.S.
and Germany, whether we seecontinued divergence, what we
(01:01:27):
see regarding these far-rightmovements in the future.
So I apologize for this longepisode, but I found this German
election really fascinating.
I hope you found it interestingas well.
We'll go back to normal episodeswith the normal production, the
normal music, the normalscripted content next time.
This episode was so different, Ihope you reach out and let me
(01:01:49):
know what you thought of it.
Remember, it'sboomertomillennialatoutlook.com.
Just a little postscript updatehere.
The Christian Democrats, or CDU,have indeed reached an agreement
to form a government incoalition with the Social
Democrats, also known as theSPD.
Friedrich Merz is set toofficially take over as
(01:02:12):
Chancellor on May 6th of 2025.
The German debt break hasn'tbeen completely removed, but it
has been quote-unquote eased toallow for more spending, much of
which will be spent on nationaldefense and support to Ukraine
because the current Americanregime has indicated its
(01:02:33):
intention to disinvest fromEuropean security.
We hope you've enjoyed thisCurrent Events related episode,
and we'll meet you back in theUSA of the 1960s in our next
episode.
Thank you so much for listening.
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